Giù in fondo ( Down Below )

Giù in fondo (Down Below) is an imaginary catalog that seeks to reconstruct the traces of a vanished garden through archival images, drawings, and recovered objects. It speaks of collecting, archaeology, and the intertwining of a multitude of associations

My dog Pakal helped me find an object. I often have the habit of walking him in the Jardin d’Été, a small garden in Arles — the city where I spent three years of my life. I began to collect objects of all kinds: large, round, made of paper, made of stone. I wondered why I was gathering them and why I wanted to collect them. In doing research about this garden, I discovered that there was another garden on the other side of it, which was destroyed in the 1970s. In its place, a pyramid-shaped parking lot was built that still preserves the remains of the old garden. Thus begins a transversal research, carried out in collaboration with the Archaeology Museum of Arles, which opened its archives on the archaeological site known as the Winter Garden.

The museum becomes my studio: I spend two months scanning everything that was hidden in the archives — bones, tombs, archaeologists’ drawings, excavation photographs. These objects form part of my collection that, in a way, represents a reconstruction of a possible garden, a garden made of images and found objects. I further combine, assemble, and recycle a set of events that make up my daily life. Different stories intertwine according to a logic that I recreate, searching for a slight irony in the passage of time.

I find myself in a defined space, a territory, a place, and I delve deeper and deeper, losing myself in disorderly archaeology. I carry out a heretical inventory where one must grasp all aspects of invention, serious play, and documented imagination by traversing a place, wherever it may be — under the parking lot, in the museum, in the archives, in memories and imaginaries.

A small shattered universe, then, a circle of fragments. Giù in fondo (Down Below)